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Many years ago within the first 10 or so years of my life as a priest, I happened to overhear what I would consider a disturbing conversation during the fellowship hour in the hall. A parishioner had mentioned that they had not participated in the typical Lenten fasting. Needless to say, there was a great deal of judging of the parishioner that ensued in the hall that day.

I was not as perturbed about the lack of the parishioner’s fasting as I was about the judging and gossip that I overheard that day. Fasting is certainly an important part of our preparations for anything regarding our receiving the Lord. We fast to prepare for Christ’s incarnation and we fast in preparation for death and resurrection of Christ. The judgmental discussions I heard really made me question why we fast and what should we expect out of this annual ritual. A trip through the Scriptures may help us to sort out the dynamics between the non-fasting parishioner and the rest of the people in the fellowship hall.

The first question in my mind is what business does anyone have to judge whether anyone fasts or not? The question of whether we fast or not is: Who are we to judge?

Let’s begin our journey with a harlot who was convicted of prostitution and was about to be stoned to death as was the Jewish custom in New Testament times. A mob of Jews brings the woman to Christ. “So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” (John 8:7) A judge must be perfect and impartial. Who are we to judge as we are far from perfect? We also see from this passage that forgiveness is more important than judging.

The point of the whole matter is summarized in this passage: “Judge not, and you shall not be judged. Condemn not, and you shall not be condemned. Forgive, and you shall be forgiven:” (Lk. 6:37) I am continually amazed at how the purple meanies come during a time when we should be focusing not on others’ ascetic efforts or lack thereof, but on our own spiritual struggles. If this is not enough to convince us of what is really important during this time of repentance, this passage should convince us: “For with what judgment you judge, you shall be judged, and with what measure you mete, it shall be measured to you again.” (Matt. 7:2)

The bottom line is that fasting is a means to an ends and we should not judge the person who fasts or the person who does not fast. Fasting is an ascetic process that is useful only when we do it with the end result in mind. We must ask the question point-blank: What results are we getting by doing this process if it does not result in a positive behavior change? That is, if we still judge others, and if we still castigate others who don’t do the process perfectly, are we no better than the Pharisees that Christ condemned when he said to those Pharisees, “But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in.” (Matt. 23:13)

We so easily forget that “it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person.” (Matt. 15:11) It is not what you abstain from eating or choose to eat that defile a person. Fasting makes no difference if what comes out of our mouths is gossip or judgmental speech. We are not getting the expected results and we are just going through a mere process that has been handed down form generation to generation.

The goal is to live and practice the natural law that comes from having a relationship with Jesus Christ. To show the importance getting proper results, that is, rising to a higher level of holiness, we encounter yet one more passage: “For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law.” (Rom. 2:14) This passage is really clear: if one gets the desired results of the law and follows the principles of the golden rule and natural law, the process they used to get to that desirable higher of level of holiness is not important at all.

Father John Behr mentioned in a webinar last Friday evening that we Orthodox Christians spend almost half a year preparing for and celebrating Pascha. It is the most important thing we do in the Church’s and our lives. When I did the math, it turns out that he’s right! We have 21 days of preparing to begin the full arduous Lenten fast: first with a fast-free week to clean out our kitchens of all meat and get ready, then we have a week of abstinence of meat to clear out all our dairy products. Then we have 40 days of Great Lent. That’s 61 days and we haven’t counted Holy week. Add another 7 days of fasting during in Holy Week and we are at 67 days. Then we have 40 days of celebration of Pascha and we arrive at Pentecost. That’s a total of 107 days. Add the Apostles fast, which can vary from none if Pascha falls in May to as much as 30 days if Pascha falls in the first week of April, and you’re at almost 140 days!

Given this arduous regimen we follow year after year to help us rise to a higher level of holiness, we need to focus more on getting the intended results in our lives than whether the process is 100% accurate. If exactness was the most important thing, the Pharisees would have gotten the intended results. If you don’t believe that, please review that Gospel reading for the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee that we read a couple of weeks ago.

Let’s remember the Publican who beat his breast in the temple and did not even look heavenward as he prayed the Jesus prayer: “God have mercy on me the sinner!” Let us also remember the Prodigal Son who came to his senses and returned to his father seeking his father’s forgiveness reminding us of how important it is to have a humble and contrite heart, a broken spirit, these God will not despise, which we recognize from Psalm 50.

Let us then understand the Scriptural purpose and desired outcomes of our Lenten exercises and focus on what comes out of our mouths and how we treat our brothers and sisters in Christ. Then our ascetic activities will lead to that higher level of holiness we seek regardless of how much we are able to do. It’s about being more than doing. If we are not being holy, we are merely doing or going through the motions for the sake of doing a process as the Pharisees of old.

Many of us have home improvement projects we are working on. Some of these projects involve major renovations, such as room additions or remodeling. We all know it’s important to start building our home improvement projects on a firm foundation. We are fellow workers in Christ who are not just completing renovations on a firm physical foundation, but on a firm spiritual foundation. This doesn’t apply only to our homes but to our parish communities. Many of us have experienced parish life at some point in our lives in parishes that were built on the rickety foundations of worldliness, extremes of ethnicity, gossip, secularism, and the like. We have encountered backbiting and cliquish behavior that is unbecoming of a Christian.

Building on a solid spiritual and physical foundation is the best preparation for the inevitable storms of life. The church is our ship to get through those storms of life. Presbytera and I had the opportunity to spend time in Guatemala working in the Hogar Rafel Ayau Orphanage.

Guatemala is most certainly a very beautiful country with its lush green tropical jungles. Presbytera and I had the opportunity to hike among the ruins of the lost Mayan city of Tikal. It was a wonderful and educational experience as the Mayans are to Guatemala and Central America what the Greeks are to western civilization.

The return plane ride to the orphanage really brought home the meaning of life storms and their impact. About ten minutes into the flight we encountered a severe storm—so severe, that the plane was going back and forth, up and down like a roller coaster. This was a frightening experience that tested our faith in God. One of the flight attendants reminded us that this was the rainy season in Guatemala and this was normal—translate that as the stormy season!

Perhaps some of you are dealing with your own life storms. You may be caring for an ailing parent, or facing the roller coaster of caring for someone dear to you that has a server degenerative illness, such as Alzheimer’s. Even during these storms of life, God is there to give strength and comfort while we weather the storm. God is there because he knows that it is during the stormy periods of our life that our faith often gives out. When our faith is giving out and we fill that our spiritual ship is sinking, this is the time we really need to bolster our faith by praying to God. These are times for praying the Jesus prayer and asking for the Theotokos to intercede for us. It is when we ask the Lord for help that He answers our prayers and stretches out His hand to save us and bring us back to the lifeboat—the Church. Perhaps it may not happen instantly, but in God’s time, he responds and the response is exactly what’s needed at the time that response comes. It is Christ who helps us weather the storm and who calms the raging tempests in our lives.

St. Herman of Alaska is a living example of a saint who lived under the most austere and stormy conditions imaginable. He built a cave to live in on Spruce Island, about a mile and a half from Kodiak. His clothing consisted of a bear fur coat, his cassock and riasa, both of which were patchworks of ancient fabrics. He did not have the conveniences we take for granted. There was no heat, electricity, or appliances. Yet God took him to a higher level through prayer and fasting. What makes Saint Herman so amazing is that he was a Wonderworker who healed fatal diseases, including a flu-like disease that killed its victims within a few days. That horrible and fatal disease had struck the local area around Spruce Island and Kodiak.

We are living temples of the Holy Spirit. As the children at the Hogar often put it, we are living lifeboats bringing God’s grace to them and to those around us. These children are thankful for these saving acts no matter how big or small they may be in our eyes. The Holy Spirit works through each and every one of us to bring God’s grace to others. Saint Herman was a living example of being positive and faithful during severe storms. The most severe storms of life related in the Scriptures would almost have to be the trials and tribulations that Job endured over the course of his life. Job lost everything: cattle, home, family members, even his health. Yet he stayed positive through it all and kept up his prayer life even though his family members urged him to give up on God and die. Why were Job, St. Herman, and countless others able to keep a positive mind set in spite of so many severe obstacles?

The reason for that is very simple: BIG is God! Our Lord’s divinity and humanity are integrated, unconfused and undivided for our salvation. His greatness brings us to greatness. This is why Christ told his disciples that through Him they will do even greater things on this earth than Christ Himself did during his earthly ministry. It is through solid faith in Christ that they and we will move mountains!

Most of us have seen and may even personally know a paraplegic or quadriplegic person. These people are paralyzed either from the waist or neck down depending on the type and severity of their afflictions. While many of us are not at risk of physical paralysis barring some kind of accident, we can be at risk of spiritual paralysis.

Spiritual paralysis is caused by sin. Our Lord came to cure spiritual paralysis by destroying sin and death by his own death and resurrection. The destruction of sin and death in our lives begins with our baptism. We are baptized by triple immersion in water; this triple immersion in the baptismal font reminds us that the font is both a tomb and a womb. It is a tomb where we put the old man sin to death and a womb where we put on Christ the new man and are reborn in a new life in Christ. This is the beginning of God’s many gifts of grace to us.

We become united as the Body of Christ, the Church through our baptism—a brotherhood of believers in the birth, death and resurrection of Christ. Unlike the Jewish laity who could not eat of the sacrifice of the altar, we partake of the Body and Blood of Christ—both clergy and laity since our Lord died once and for all to conquer sin and death in his flesh and freely gave Himself for our spiritual food and nourishment.

Our Lord is both human and God at the same time—unconfused and undivided. This fundamental Christian truth cannot be over-analyzed lest our analysis push the envelope of Christ’s divinity and humanity to extremes and exposing us to heresy. We commemorate the Fathers of the first six Ecumenical Councils on this day because they by their living examples and by their teaching navigated the intellectual landmine of over-analysis and presented the nature of Christ and the Holy Trinity, preserving and protecting the Church’s teachings from the extremes of heresy. The hymns at vespers are a lesson in the Church’s Christology. If we take Christ’s humanity to extremes as did Arius we run into the heresy of Arianism—a heresy which is alive and well in the cult of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. If we emphasis Christ’s state of being and limit it to one state at a time, we can end up with a variety of heresies, including monophysitism and monthelitism—these heresies that are alive and well in the Mormon and several other faiths. One could go on and on as the first six Ecumenical Councils dealt with these and more heresies—Nestorianism, Sabellianism, just to name a couple more.

These heresies are a root cause of spiritual paralysis in mankind. Are these the only causes of spiritual paralysis in man? Perhaps not, but they are a starting point. Heresies are a cause of division in the Church which is why St. Paul exhorts the Church to try to get divisive people in the Church to reconcile themselves with the Church. However, if they refuse to reconcile then we have no choice but to cut bait so to speak and have nothing more to do with them. I am not talking about people who have differences of opinion due to the different local traditions within our Orthodox Christian jurisdictions. One set of local traditions is not necessarily better than another. One calendar is not better than another. What is important is that there is unity through this diversity of local traditions. We have a common core set of Holy Tradition and theology that is consistent across all of our jurisdictions. Harmonizing these local traditions is likely to take a couple of generations.

Are there other heresies that are looming over the horizon? I think there are—a very divisive one that has taken a particular hold in this country is that of phyletism. Several Orthodox metropolitans have expressed their concerns publicly by challenging and exhorting the world’s Orthodox Patriarchs to put aside politics and stop paralyzing the Orthodox Churches in America by allowing and encouraging them to become one autocephalous Orthodox Church in this country.

Such a united Orthodox Church could do so much more for the entire world—the social ministries that would be spawned are phenomenal and beyond imagination. We could begin to build schools, hospitals, old age homes, homeless shelters, drug rehabilitation facilities and so much more. A united Church in the United States would have the critical mass and power to provide financial support not only to its ministries in the United States, but tremendous support to the Mother Churches throughout the world. This would be a power­house second to none. However, as our metropolitan said, we and our Church’s leaders throughout the world have to continue to stand up against heresy and protect the Church’s teachings the way the Fathers of the first six Ecumenical Councils did and express our faith with conviction, boldness and power, which can only come from our Lord.

The challenges to creating an administratively unified Orthodox Church in the United States is made challenging by the difficulties in coming to consensus on our what the local traditions should look like. Do we make adjustments needed to make the church accessible to all given the realities of life in the United States? If the church as a whole decides to make adjustments, do they really compromise the faith or are we as Orthodox Christians afraid of taking the world by the horns and being effective Christian witnesses? These are difficult and thorny questions that need to be answered and these will take time to resolve—maybe a couple of generations.

The paralytic in the Gospel was healed by a combination of his own faith and faith of his friends. Curing our own spiritual paralysis as individual Christians and as a Church will take nothing less than the collective faith of each and every Orthodox Christian here and everywhere. The challenges to overcome seem immense, but the rewards to us and the Church are beyond imagination and our wildest dreams.

A few years ago I had the opportunity to serve as a judge for a youth speech competition run by a local group of multi-denominational Protestant churches. I was asked to join a panel of judges in the Apologetics division of the competition.

The participants took on a variety of different topics and some, though not many, included citations from the Fathers of the Church, notably Athansius the Athonite whose apologetics were key to conquering a number Continue reading How to Heal Spiritual Paralysis and Build Up the Body of Christ, the Church

Perhaps the most frightening experience one can have is for someone with bipolar or borderline personality disorder snapping and just losing it. The behavior such individuals can display during an episode can be a horrifying and scary experience. One can say that in the early Christian times severe mental illness was believed to be a sign of demon possession or being under the influence of Satan. Continue reading Satan Has No Power! Not Even Over Swine!

Are you saved? We all have been asked this question at one time or another by well-meaning and concerned evangelical Protestant brethren. This question makes some of us pause and think and perhaps makes others wonder what kind of trite question is this.

Romans 5:1-10  examines this issue in depth. The crux of this question is the classic evangelical Protestant understanding, or rather misunderstanding of faith, works and the justification of man by Jesus Christ. Continue reading Are You Saved?

Many of us have been following the news of the day. Over the last week, riots have broken out in major cities over the deaths of two different black men who were arrested for criminal activity while in police custody. Needless to say, this news has both polarized our ethnic minorities and paralyzed our nation.

Sin also causes paralysis and it comes in a multitude of flavors. The Pharisees exhibited one form of paralysis. Jesus heals a paralytic on the Sabbath no less, and incurs the wrath of a group of men, leaders of the Jewish community. Could sin be at work here? Let’s take a look. In his book, Counterfeit Gods, Timothy Keller, a well-known Presbyterian thinker and minister with Orthodox Christian leanings discusses misuse of power and seeking of power over people as putting ourselves in God’s place, or making ourselves to be gods. The Pharisees made the process holier than the results the process was intended to produce.

Why would it be OK to water one’s animals that provided their livelihood on the Sabbath, yet it is not OK to heal someone of disease, such as paralysis or dare I say some life-threatening disease such as cancer? I can just see those Pharisees now. Our Dr. Prescop is making his rounds at the medical clinic on the Sabbath. You can’t do that you have to wait until Sunday or Monday to to that. “Well, if I wait until then, my patient may be dead and I would be negligent of my duties.” The Pharisee says, “So what, the Sabbath is a holy day and that takes precedence.” This vignette is not about the Sabbath, but about use of power and leadership.

When we put ourselves in God’s place, that is, when we make ourselves to be god, we are no longer God-like. We become counterfeit gods. God gave us our processes as a means to get to a spiritual end. The struggle we have as Orthodox Christians living in Silicon Valley—or anywhere else in the United States for that matter—is that we are doing Orthodoxy. We reduce our faith to doing certain prescribed things in prescribed manner, whether it is fasting, our manner of prayer, the services we attend and what we do during these various processes. While these are important, they are not the most important. The important thing that our Lord intended the Pharisees and us to do is to become unparalyzed by focusing on being Orthodox Christians. Being an Orthodox Christian is about cultivating the fruits we call the virtues. These are things like charity, respect for others, empowering others, caring for others who need it. It is not about controlling other people. We are not a cult, but rather, the Church is an institution set up by our Lord himself to allow people to heal and empower each other through God’s grace working through each and every one of us.

That is, the Church is in the words of Timothy Keller, “a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.” He is not putting down saints in and of themselves as many of the saints gave up their lives to defend and protect the Church from the ravages of heresy. We as Orthodox Christians would do well to keep this in mind, we are not a museum but a living organism, one that truly is a hospital for healing sinners.

Our Lord gave his life up and suffered on the Cross for all of us, taking on all of the sin of the world and creating a path to life for us that cost him his life. He demonstrated the proper use of power in his earthly life. It was not about destroying us and controlling us. It was about freedom of choice. To empower others, we by nature have to give up some power. Anyone who is a teacher knows that you have to allow a child to make mistakes in the learning process. We learn more from our mistakes than from what we do right. If we do something right consistently, we already know that skill. It is expected that when we are learning a new skill, we will be a bit awkward.

Christ not only heals physical paralysis, but spiritual paralysis as well, if we let him. The paralytic asked the Lord to have mercy on him and heal him. What does this say to us? It says that we need to focus on the balance of process and look at the results we generate. Doing so prevents us from turning the process into a counterfeit god. Focusing on the results allows us to use the process the way God intended. We are blessed in our parish because for the most part that is what we strive to do just that. Our humanity, however, does occasionally get in the way, which is why we must be aware of our propensity for building our own idols—and even worse—giving them Orthodox-sounding names!

However, we also must not get haughty and live in our past. We need to understand what we are dealing with in our American culture and not run away form the world. If our Lord ran away from the world, he might not have given up his life for us and we might not be saved as a result. We as Orthodox Christians must embrace the world and take the proverbial bull by the horns if we are to be effective as Christians and as a Church. That is how we heal the paralysis in our lives—by letting God in to do that healing—we also get the bonus of being more effective in doing God’s work in our lives and in the lives of others.

Our Lord gave himself as food for the faithful so that the faithful are spiritually nourished and empowered to empower themselves and others and change the world, not to bow down to a process that is only the means to the ends. We must focus on our being rather than doing if we are to have the phenomenal results the apostles and countless other Christians after them attained. The choice is ours because God gave us the freedom to choose.